FAU Football Shows Great Strides in Spring's 1st Scrimmage

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By Staff Reports, Mar 28th 2015, 6:00 PM

A balanced day with tremendous improvement was the word coming out of Florida Atlantic University’s open Saturday scrimmage.

“I’m excited that I saw success on both sides of the ball,” said Charlie Partridge, FAU’s head football coach. “There were times when our office was able to finished drives, especially in the later have of the scrimmage. It was good see our defense get some stops. Our offense has had a lot of success this spring. We are nicked up at linebacker. We are being protective of some guys. We are trying to be smart there. So we had some younger guys, some inexperience linebackers - to get some stops is encouraging.”

The young linebackers were not the only bright spot of the game. Newcomer Daniel Parr saw his first action as he joined senior Jaquez Johnson, junior Greg Hankerson, redshirt freshman Jason Driskel and Dom Marino, who all took snaps under center.

“I’m excited about some of the young guys. Daniel Parr shows that he’s got mobility and has a nice touch on the ball,” added Partridge. “Trey Rodriguez had some explosive plays. He had some freshman mistakes also.”

The offense scored twice with Johnson finding fellow senior Derek Moise for a score and Greg Howell punching in another. Defensively, the Owls had two turnovers. Senior Cre’von LeBlanc went up and fought for a ball to prevent a score and come away with the interception. The defense also recovered a fumble.

“There was the interception by Cre’von, when the offense was driving down, that was a really, really good play by him. I thought it was a well thrown ball but a nice play by a very good defensive back…the encouraging thing is the offense was able to move the ball we just have to get the penalties cleaned up. I asked the officials to call it aggressively for the sake of our own development. They certainly did that and I appreciate that. Our ‘O’ line is much better and our ‘D’ line continues to improve. We have to continue to figure out who our linebacker corps is going to be. But, I’m encouraged that both side of the ball had success,” added Partridge. “We just have a lot of work to do to be game ready.”

FAU spring practices will conclude Saturday, April 11 with a 1 p.m. Spring Game played in FAU Stadium.